Watch Movies on USB Flash Drives - Legally!

Just in time for Christmas, you'll be able to carry movies in your coin purse ... wear them around your neck ... hold them on one finger ... lose them in your shirt pocket. Two companies have announced technology that will allow full-length movies to be sold on USB flash memory devices -- legally. CinemaNow USB Movie Drives "will include an integrated media player as well as the necessary video codecs to enable instant high-quality PC playback of movie content offline," according to a prepared statement released by the companies, Sonic Solutions and Widevine.

"Once connected to the Internet," the press release says, users will be able to access the content on other devices, "such as networked Blu-ray Disc players and connected televisions." High-Def Digest suggests that the devices may be "an effort to meet with consumer demand for digital copies while keeping retail stores in the loop."

Movie-themed USB flash drives have been around for a while -- like the one for The Godfather -- and with the growing memory capacity on the drives, for ever-lowering prices, I suppose this kind of device was inevitable. Sonic Solutions and Widevine have not yet announced any partnerships with movie studios, and there's no word on how "high-quality" the movies will look or what the prices will be. This sounds like a stop-gap device, something for non-tech folks who don't want to mess around with downloads or loading digital copies from DVDs onto their personal computers. Would you buy movies on USB flash drives?